Science becomes engaging when students know that what they learn in the classroom relates to their own lives and communities. This article describes a project in which students use field exploration and online software to design virtual solutions to improve the hydrology of their school yard. The project is called Teaching Environmental…

Chemistry in high school is often presented as a jumbled mass of topics drawn from inorganic, analytical, and physical sub-disciplines. With no central theme to build on, students may have trouble grasping the chemical sciences as a coherent field. In this article, Stowe and Elvey describe an activity that integrates different facets of chemistry…

This article describes a lesson on the greenhouse effect in which students explore blackbody radiation and Wien's law. The lesson, which has been tested in a variety of high school physics classrooms, uses probeware and online simulations and combines two well-established instructional strategies: the 5E Learning Cycle (Bybee et al. 2006) and the…

A modified technique for demonstrating the magnitude of Avogadro's number using a new Raspberry Pi computer and the Python language is described. The technique also provides students the opportunity to review dimensional analysis.

The article describes the use of Mathematica, a computer algebra system (CAS), in a high school chemistry course. Mathematica was used to generate a graph, where a slider controls the value of parameter(s) in the equation; thus, students can visualize the effect of the parameter(s) on the behavior of the system. Also, Mathematica can show the…

Formal mathematical methods remain, for most high school students, mysterious, artificial and not a part of their regular intuitive thinking. The authors develop some themes that could lead to a radically new approach. According to this thesis, the teaching of programming languages as a regular part of academic progress can contribute effectively…

Less than half of the students in the United States graduate from high school and are ready to take college-level math courses. Many years and varieties of remedial math programs have failed to dramatically improve outcomes, especially at scale. The question we face is whether technology in general, and open educational resources in particular,…

The prototype of a guided practice application was developed to instruct year 13 biology students in the process of DNA replication. The application uses a high degree of interaction to engage the student in a guided exploration and problem solving exercise. An evaluation revealed that the students showed considerable enthusiasm and significant…

Recent developments in digital rights enablement for video, plus inexpensive purpose-built applications such as the Media on Demand system, are now adding video to the montage of rich media objects for learning online. Video libraries and repositories can be customized and stored on local servers for access by place-based or distance learners as…

In the fall of 2002, Visions In Education, a charter school for home-schooled and independent-study children, opened Visions High School Academy (www.visions academy.org), a virtual project-based high school. The five educators who started the program--Mark Jackson, Fred Lamora, Celine Darby, Jennifer Russell and the author--identified three…

This article describes practical issues related to the design and the development of a Web-Based Learning Environment (Web-LE) for high school students. The purpose of the Fossilization Web-LE was to help students understand the process of fossilization, which is a complex phenomenon and is affected by many factors. The instructional design team…

This paper describes part of a project called Modeling Across the Curriculum which is a large-scale research study in 15 schools across the United States. The specific data presented and discussed here in this paper is based on BioLogica, a hypermodel, interactive environment for learning genetics, which was implemented in multiple classes in…

This article describes how a K-12 school in South Florida adopted a course management system with e-portfolio capabilities. E-portfolios are available tools, though more costly, in higher-end course management systems and are gaining recognition in the K-12 market. However, according to a recent survey administered by the technology team at the…

A school district in the southwestern United States has over the past several years built its infrastructure to support high-quality technology integration by its teachers. The district partnered with a nearby university's educational technology graduate program to develop a digital high school project. Teachers and advanced instructional-design…